Ambient Television
Page1(14 of 329)

I N T R O D U C T I O N T H E P U B L I C L I V E S O F T V We tend to think of the location of the tv screen as the home, or even the living room, but this book is about television’s presence in the rou- tine locations we move through when we leave the house—the store, the waiting room, the bar, the train station, the airport. These sites of com- merce, bureaucracy, and community, constituting the landscape of public life today, are also arenas in which we commonly encounter the television screen.TV enters the everyday built environment under numerous guises, from art to advertising, from entertainment to information. Sometimes it is in the form of a commercial tv system especially dedicated to one type of location, like cnn’s Airport Network. At other times, particularly in retail stores, it is in the form of ‘‘point-of-purchase video,’’ designed by marketers to motivate acts of consumption on the sales floor. And in other locations still, a monitor sits where it can ﬁt, on an overhead shelf or on top of a refrigeration unit, placed there for the viewing pleasures of the space’s users and employees. We don’t always pay much attention to these various forms of ambient television, although, as I will suggest, they can teach us a great deal about the power politics of spectatorship and commerce in contemporary public space. What the tv set does outside the home—what social acts it performs, or is roped into, what struggles it embodies and intervenes in, what agencies speak through it, and which subjectsitsilencesoralternatelygivesavoice—arethequestionsthatdrive this book. The quotidian geography of tv in public is composed of sites where commerce and bureaucracy, purpose and drift, routine and event inter- weave, places in which television’s presence remains largely unexamined by scholars and critics. In these places, as at home, the screen serves site- speciﬁc purposes, its placement and use carrying out local tasks and chan-